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Scott McCloud Tries Webcomic Micropayment
jaime g. wong writes "Scott McCloud's latest comic, 'The Right Number', is finally available online... for just 25 cents! McCloud has discussed the concept of micropayment for online comics before; let's all hope this idea, using BitPass technology, will succeed." There's more info via a a Comic Book Resources article, and Tycho over at Penny Arcade also has opinions on the micropayment route: "..if you have enough readers who care about your work to go through all that rigmarole, you could succeed with any business model... I see it as a model for compensation, lined up with the other models for compensation, like at the police station."
people who don't/can't have a credit card/PayPal account/whatever ?
Is that a millionth of a normal payment?
Games Workshop Petition
leave me out. I've inserted quarter after quarter, but now all my drive does is grind.
Stephen King already tried that and it doesn't work. Micropayments are too complicated. It reminds me of shareware... "please register" and stuff.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
But, "me too". What about people who can't (teenagers, for example) pay online? Is there something that will allow them to still read their much sought-after content (mailing in a money order to pre-pay, or something along those lines)?
More ads + higher prices.
http://www.pico-pay.com/
Users don't actually pay anything, but need to watch some advertiser web-sites. Might be worthwhile for Comic publishers and independent music publishers too.
I hope that micropayments catch on. Right now, you need to jump through hoops to get it going, but if the cost to the webmaster is low enough, and it becomes common enough that people use it frequently, this could be a viable business model.
It will be absolutely wonderful for people who want to see a small amount of quality content, without having to buy the whole sack of kittens. Also, I think folks will find it invaluable as a "try before you buy" sort of thing. I don't like subscriptions, I don't want to buy your t-shirts, but micropayments have really caught my attention.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
99% of web comics suck. The 1% that don't don't need to worry about payment.
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here.
In today's PA Tycho clarifies this somewhat by making an interesting point about micropayments: they can only keep you afloat if you get lots of them. And if you're a comic producer getting that much attention, you can probably survive by selling ad space, merchandising, subscriptions etc. So the numbers needed to make micropayments viable are probably similar to the numbers needed to make web comics viable (in a business sense) full stop.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I tried to find out how much I (as an overseas customer) actually
have to pay to get $3 worth of BitPass credits, but even after the
15th click through their pages and "FAQ" I couldn't find out. Do
they accomodate for all charges, or do I end up with 15 EUR deducted
from my VISA card, including charges, currency conversion fees, for
3 dollars of cyber currency?
Used to say donations and banner ad's weren't effective. That is until he put up a paypal donation button...
Several thousand dollars later, stunned by the fiscal support of his readers, he got a job in the industry and quit writing...
Doesn't penny arcade use a similar system(or used to). I remember the page having a themometer and measuring donations in thousands.
So if good content can get by on donations, are micropayments even interesting anymore?
Sure would be nice if you could buy an ecash card in the checkout lane at wal-mart. If the phone company can do it I just don't understand why a banking company can't.
Fucking hell - even Hustler does it. Time for Visa to step out of the 70's.
Will MicroPay if you mod me up
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
If they put no copy protection on it, you'll just steal it.
If they put copy protection on it, you'll bitch about fair use, wait till someone brighter than you hacks it, and then steal it.
Does that sum things up?
Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in. People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use). They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill. To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments. The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions). The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous). You know, now that I think about it . . . *starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
For to end yet again.
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here [penny-arcade.com].
(from PA's webserver) Warning: Host '192.168.50.65' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /data/users/penny-arcade/www/php_admin_header.php3 on line 11
Perhaps Scott can mock them back for having their backend database server automatically block their frontend webserver, which is pretty piss-poor of whoever their admin is...not to mention, crappy error handling(programmer's fault) and insecure PHP configuration options(sysadmin again- detailed PHP errors shouldn't go to the user, only the logs, and yes, PHP has an option for this. For example, I now know that php_admin_header.php3 is probably an include- and includes sometimes do fun/exciting/revealing things when executed standalone.)
Please help metamoderate.
Could be worse. I could be pintpayments.
"Let's see, 12 inches in a foot, pint's a pound the world around, 2 weeks in a fortnight...so to view 36 comics over 6 weeks I'd need to pay him...ah crap, does anyone remember how many pints in in a gallon?"
Please help metamoderate.
I gave it a try. BitPass was painless to setup. I clicked on the $3 button, entered my email address as a username, a password, credit card info, and was reading the comic within 60 seconds.
How was the story? Excellent! It is an enjoyable story with moments of tension and humor tied together by an underlying theme of mathematics. Great adult geek fare. I highly recommend it, although I'm still trying to decide if it was long enough for 25 cents. (Afterall I pay nothing for my operating system!)
Michael.
Linux : Mac
any of the gold based systems. for example e-gold.com (800,000+ account holders, averaging ~1-2 million USD plus in transactions per day, fee for a 25 cent transaction is .25 cents worth of gold).
.25 worth of gold.
see a comparison of 8 of these type of systems here.
how hard is it to accept 25 cents worth of gold?
click 100998-USD.25.e-gold.com to pay
Debit cards are still not anonymous. When your little brother pays for something that purchase still can be traced to his home. When you pay cash for something, however, this isn't always so. That's why I said ecash and not debit; I was speaking of a card that was nothing but a number of an "account" with X dollars in it; you buy the card (maybe for X+$3 so the card issuer gets its service fee), and when the money in that "account" is spent you throw the card away - just like those phone cards you'll find littering any large city.
I hope they don't. They give most of the power to whoever runs the micropayment system. There are already too many middle men on media, and I don't want another lobbying force in there.
.$.25 on my card - I don't want to risk credit problems, overcharging, fraud, or any of the other problems that dealing with e-money inherently create, and making a ton of small purchases exacerbate.
Further, you can't be sure that you'll get what you pay for when you buy information without having seen it (click here to get this comic - except that this one is with a guest artist who doesn't know how to draw and is too stupid to make good jokes).
You want a good alternative? Try the subscription model. It works beautifully, and even if you can't get what you pay for the first time, over a course of ALL the articles you can look at, you can know. Plus, it's easier to provide samples of some of the content you'll see, so that the artists won't inadvertently defraud anyone (which is very likely to happen if they do micropayments - through the use of articles that turn out to be duds).
Finally, you have to consider the value to the customer. I don't want to put a $.25 charge on my credit card. I don't want 50
I'd much prefer a huge one-time payment so that I didn't have to worry as much about it.
I would say that we should boycott any place that believes that micropayments are a good idea, but I don't think I have to.
That business model is as unsound as a vaccuum.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Personally I don't think micropayments will work because it goes against the basic way we all use the web. You fire up a web browser, you navigate to where you want to go, stuff shows up in the browser window. The stuff in that window you pretty much never worry about paying for.
:) But my views on this are a little extreme, and really, I only apply them to my own works (in fact, I decided to no put something in a magazine publication because I decided that it was ripping people off to make them pay for it first)
:P
I think that when people spend money, and it doesn't matter how much, they like to have something tangible in their hands. A book, a poster, whatever. Having to pay to just look at something. Paying for gif or jpg files arranged on your screen (or flash versions, whatever) just doesn't feel like it has any value. I think people just don't warm up to the concept. Its like the whole DivX thing - it failed because people did NOT like the idea of owning a disk and having to pay for each time they viewed the what was on it. It was like 'I own this, yet I am locked out'. Video Rentals work fine, because we use something tangible, and we return it. We've paid to use something tangible, and we gave it back.
The web is a little similar to that - we expect to be able to access stuff when we go to a site. Successful pay for content sites usually work because the gateway to that content is a subscription fee and you get a LOT of content in return. Webcomics don't work well under that because, well, its hard to produce that much content that quick ^^;;;. Comic require a lot of work of a long period of time. In fact, one of the nice things about comics is that they have the ability to improve over time because the creators get better, and they build a backlist of comics to view - the body of work slowly becomes something of value over time.
By the time you work up to have enough content that is worth charging for, you cant suddenly make your archives pay-only. At least, I personally feel its wrong. Making something that was once free suddenly a pay thing doesn't work, and just makes people feel like they are being used and abused. After all, it's the readers who have been reading and finding the comic and the site that have made it something of value in the fist place.
The micropayment idea is, logically, a wonderful idea - small payments for small bits of content. Biggest problem it has, to me, is that it smacks of metering - people hate being metered. People like to relax while going thru things - ask most people, they'd rather pay a bigger fee for unlimited usage than worry about what their bill will be later - even if it's more expensive in the long run. People spend money emotionally, not with the logic portion of their brain.
People hate 'pay for what you use' models. The more media companies push this idea that it's the viewing of the content that you are paying for, the more people thumb their noses and download mp3s and fire up bittorents of DVD rips.
Making the nature of the digital world work with the way the confluxicated human mind works is not always an easy task. While I said it wont work, I think its very much worth a try. I have a bit of a personal issue with making people pay for anything art related, because I don't feel that just viewing , listening, watching or reading anything creative should ever be paid for - there is enough money to be made in between the cracks with the incidentals that all this worry over actually getting paid for content sometimes puzzles me
Yet, somehow, I've managed to survive, and its not right for me to think that others might do it the same ways I have. Maybe micropayments are the thing, I dunno, I just draw stuff, what do I know
piro
::: fred hides at fredart.com
First, the idea that every website is going to start charging people per page is asinine. The sites that try to nickel and dime you to death will end up in the same graveyard as the sites that try to advertise you to death. Don't you already mentally blacklist websites doused in crazy blinking Flash ads or shoshkeles? Most of us will just add the nickel-and-diming sites to the same pile. And advertising will always make more sense than micropayments for large, brand-oriented sites like CNN.com.
Second, the BitPass model isn't going to spring any sudden credit card surprises on anyone. It's essentially the prepaid phonecard model applied to online content. You buy a BitPass card for as little as $3, spend it in nickels, dimes and quarters on your favorite webcomic, band or online beggar, and you're done. Buy another card if you want, or don't. It's pretty simple.
Third, I've often heard people saying things like "I think an entire cent is too much" for online content and "it better be DAMN well WORTH it!"
Let's get some perspective. Name anything that provides more than 15 seconds worth of enjoyment for a dime. Give it a shot. Even a quarter. What can you buy for a quarter? Anything? You probably couldn't get a hobo to kick you in the nuts for a quarter. Whining about the epic, tragic loss of a dime? That's comical. Griping that even an entire cent is too much to support the artists you like? That's insulting.
Scott's comic is a good example of the value of micropayments. It's worth a quarter; it's not worth $7. There are all kinds of creators out there who are excited about micropayments because they know subscription or donation-based models don't work for them. There are worthwhile websites that aren't ad friendly that are creaking under the strain of overwhelming bandwidth bills. Micropayments enable them to survive and flourish.
Tycho's quote that "if you have enough readers who care about your work to go through all that rigamaroll, you could succeed with any business model" just isn't true. If you have 10,000 readers who are willing to spend 25 cents a month on you, then the only way you're going to get that money is through micropayments. Period. With micropayments, you're a creative indie superstar making a living; without them, you're just another schlub barely keeping his website afloat.
If BitPass succeeds -- and with the engine of webcomics behind them, I think they actually might -- it will change the web. Not in the drastic, market-mad campfire story ways, but in the amount of enjoyment and information we'll be able to squeeze out of the web. There will be more websites worth going to, more musicians being rewarded, more webcomics worth reading, more webloggers not just blogging but reporting.
I'd say that's worth a quarter.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
In your system, you'd be paying 10 cents a comic. However, as I think the guys at Megatokyo recently talked about, there are different ways of viewing a web comic. At first, you're getting into it, and reading all the back story. If they post 3 strips a week, and you're like, 3 years behind, you're looking at 45 bucks just to catch up. Then you're looking at 10 cents a day every time it updates. In your app, going back to look at old comics would be free, as you already paid for them. So, while I definitely see the up side of your system, I think you'd need some kind of bulk-archive rate to make it viable.
Valete!
Internet content is like walking down Mission Beach in Cali with all the street performers (stay with me...). There's so much going on, good and bad, whose hat do you toss your quarter in? A 'donation' system would work so much better if it's promoted as more of a tip. Having recognizable icons we could click on and select amount to tip. These tips would build up until a 30 day cycle and charged to our card. The tip process could show our current tab each time we click the icon. No for some hypothetics (is that a word?): Out of everyone who watches/reads/plays something online, say 20% will drop a 'tip in the jar' after enjoying it, probably only 3% of those would have opted for the prepay method (leaving 97% passing by without making eye contact, including me). We have to get over the fact that potentially 80% of the people will enjoy it and walk on by without tipping. It needs to be an easy process. I followed the first few episodes of "Starship Irregulars" on www.icebox.com until they started the prepay micropayments. If they had an option of 'tipping' I know I would (and have in the past through Amazon) watch a few of their shows and give a little something. I remember giving 'beer money' to Drew over at Fark a long time ago because he asked for it and I enjoy what he's created! There's just something off-putting about prepaying for the unkown. That feeling's amplified when doing it online.
Why pay when there are free comics?
Because content isn't interchangable. Little 12 year old Billy's Dragonball Z wannabe comic is not the same as Scott McCloud's 'Right Number'. Billy's drek being free doesn't make it more worthwhile than Scott's which is a quarter.
Comic creators can just ask for donations or sell merchandise or adspace - Megatokyo does.
So comics are just a vehicle for pushing merchandise? What if the type of story you're telling doesn't lend itself well to easily marketed chareacters or advertising tie-ins - like Keeping Two or Nowhere Girl? Should the artists adjust their tales so that can accomodate the merchandising? Maybe add some cute, wise-cracking animal sidekicks the way Disney does?
If I was getting something I could keep I might do it. But I don't pay for non-tangible items.
So you've never paid to go to a concert or the theatre. You've never paid admission at a gallery or exhibit. You don't go to the movies. You have no cable tv.
So long as prices are reasonable, I'm willing to pay for an experience. In this case it's the experience of reading a comic. And a quarter for a full-size comic is definitely worth it.
I don't want to pay for something that I don't know will be good
So don't pay. No one's forcing you to.
Unless the person had previous work as proof of their competency or offer some sort of a preview (as subscription site ModernTales does), then they won't be getting money from me unless I see some damn good reviews. If artists are smart, they'd offer the past several strips free and just charge for the archives - until their name is enough of a draw that they can justify charging cash upfront (as is the case with McCloud's comic).
Yar - pirates
If someone wants to rip off the artist - the artist can't really stop 'em. But as McCloud mentioned in his comic on the subject, it requires someone to use their resources and time. If the artists are charging a reasonable rate - I'm willing to assume that most people would ante up the quarter as opposed to hunting for a pirated copy or sharing a pirated copy themselves.
--- No Boom? No Boom today. Boom tomorrow, there's always a boom tomorrow.
As I recall, he made quite a bit of money and he didn't even have to finish the book. Seemed as if it worked well enough..
Twenties Retirement
DigiCash's eCash, CyberCash's CyberCoin, Millicent, nCash (NTT), Paybox, ...
... Will ... Explode ... Flashback ... 199x ... Internet Bubble ...
Head
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, leave me alone. Do NOT EVER TRY A MICROPAYMENT A G A I N! Just don't.
On the BitPass site, they sell prepaid "cards" that are just account numbers. Unfortunately, they map to credit cards, or PayPal (which maps to credit cards or bank accounts). So, there's no way to simply place money into their system, without using a credit card or a bank account.
I can walk a block to the local convenience store on the street corner, and have my choice of over a dozen brands of prepaid phone cards! I give the store clerk some cash, and get a prepaid phone card. It is completely anonymous, and nobody has to pay the high fees of credit cards. I don't need to be a certain age, or have a clean credit history, or live in a certain country, to qualify. Anybody can walk in and pay cash for these cards! This is a huge market.
I have often wished I could buy a prepaid "webcard" in the same way. I would buy a card, and it would have a fixed value that would be depleted as I spend it online. It could also function as a normal prepaid phone card, to be used as a wedge to get into stores that only are willing to sell phone cards.
When I can walk into a convenience store and see a stack of prepaid BitPass cards for sale, I will know they have a chance to be successful. People that can't get a credit card will be able to still buy things online. This could be huge for the large number of teenagers that play online games and such! I really hope that BitPass can get their cards into stores, so that they can be bought with cash.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Other sites have also been experimenting with this sort of thing, like User Friendly's membership program.
So I don't think it's a huge step to get to micropayments - the only real advantage micropayments have over the current methods is that you can try content earlier for lower risk (ie, $.25 vs. $10).
And of course people have mentioned Apple's success with single song downloading. I think people are ready/willing to pay for what they get online, the price just needs to be right.
First of all, this isn't a comic strip that he's selling, it's more like a comic book. When all three installments are finished, it will be longer than an average comic book. To read the whole thing will cost you 75 cents. That's a good price for a comic book.
Second, you seem to have a lot of ideas about what "people" and "most people" want. Perhaps we should give this model a try before we dismiss it, hmm?
Third, you obviously didn't read the BitPass site very carefully. There are no extra fees for the buyer. A $10 account costs you $10. A $3 account costs you $3. You are correct that it is something like buying "disney dollars." At the moment, there aren't many goods or services you can buy with these payments, but I was willing to invest $3 up front to support a system that I want to succeed. Hopefully, there will soon be many other artists offering their work through this system, and with the size of the payments it will still probably take me a while to spend it all.
Third, you demand that people sell in bulk instead of messing around with new ways of selling. The fact of the matter is, selling in bulk just doesn't work for most online comics. How many artists do you know that are making their livings by selling subscriptions? Well, there's you, and...um...sluggy...and.... You get the idea. The only thing that comes close to working for most online comics is the type of site that gathers a bunch of comics together for one price. Not to mention that some people don't have "bulk" to sell. They may spend months creating a beautifully written and drawn comic book that they want to sell online. They can charge $1 or more for it, and sell a handful of copies, they can give it away for free and have the whole world see it but go broke and be unable to continue hosting it, or they can charge a small fee for it and get a nice compromise. They can't afford to wait until they've made three more comic books and charge $2 for three months of viewing. It's just not practical. Not everyone is running a store. Some people are just trying to sell their art, and the less they can charge, the better exposure they will get.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
I can go down to 7-11 and pay cash for a prepaid phone card. The card has a many-digit number on the back, and when I want to make a call I gotta type in that number. This is a bit of a pain, but the entire system works without me having to give up a CC number or even my name.
This is how I want web micropayments to work. I wanna go to 7-11 for beer, and a weekend of webcomics. Nicely anonymous.
I don't think eCash or iCash (which term is prefered?) can work globally, across the internet on an anonymous or even a somewhat anonymous basis, the way regular currency does. Here's my thinking...
To be accepted, whole and undisputed, currency needs to be backed by someone or something that we trust. That's why a $5.00 bill is accepted as being worth $5.00 by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Joe Schmoe. The US Government backs the bill. The reason eCash won't work is because it's not backed by the government, but by corporations. And corportate eCash simply doesn't instill the same sense of trust that government-backed currency does.
I see no future for concepts such as eCash without the backing of the government.